Chinese Name - Family Names

Family Names

Although there are currently over 4,000 Chinese surnames (姓, xìng) in use in China, the colloquial expression for the "Chinese people" is the Bǎi Xìng (百姓, "The Hundred Names") and a mere hundred surnames still make up over 85% of China's 1.3 billion citizens. In fact, just the top three – Wang (王), Li (李), and Zhang (张) – cover more than 20% of the population. This homogeneity results from the great majority of Han family names having only one character, while the small number of compound surnames is mostly restricted to minority groups. This has not always been true in Chinese history: between the first and fifth centuries AD, a law against multiple-character personal names briefly popularized two-character surnames and a number of important figures like Zhuge Liang and Sima Qian possessed them. As of 2009, in the United States, 70,000 family names represent 90% of U.S. citizens.

Chinese surnames arose from two separate prehistoric traditions: the xìng (姓) and the shì (氏). The original xìng were clans of royalty at the Shang court and always included the 'woman' radical 女. The shì did not originate from families, but denoted fiefs, states, and titles granted or recognized by the Shang court. Apart from the Jiang (姜) and Yao (姚) families, the original xìng have nearly disappeared but the terms ironically reversed their meaning. Xìng is now used to describe the shì surnames which replaced them, while shì is used to refer to maiden names.

The enormous modern clans sometimes share ancestral halls with one another, but actually consist of many different lineages gathered under a single name. As an example, the surname Ma (马) includes descendants of the Warring States–era bureaucrat Zhao She, descendants of his subjects in his fief of Mafu, Koreans from an unrelated confederation, and Muslims from all over western China who chose it to honor Muhammad. Nonetheless, however tenuous these bonds sometimes are, it remains a minor taboo to marry someone with the same family name.

Traditionally, Chinese women became part of their husband's family but retained their old surnames, while their children acquired the father's name. The difficulties faced in implementing national identification systems have caused the Chinese government to reconsider those customs. In the last decade, it has promoted laws permitting parents to grant children either surname or either combination of their surnames in the hope that the more unusual ones will be chosen. Likewise, wives are being permitted to add their husband's name to their own, although this has only become popular in Hong Kong among the upper class and older generations.